


everywhere

by Wallyallens



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Roadtrip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-03 23:56:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11543124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallyallens/pseuds/Wallyallens
Summary: Daisy & Robbie crash land in a village and have to find their own way home. Yay, roadtrips. prompt on tumblr: 'quakerider + a long car ride' which somehow became this.





	everywhere

**Author's Note:**

> *listens to the paramore cover of everywhere on repeat endlessly*

It starts like this: Daisy and Robbie and a containment module falling from the sky, flaming as it falls like a shooting star, but it isn’t one for wishing on.

There is no time to bail, no time to slow their descent. No time to do anything but look at one another as the ground approaches. Daisy’s eyes are wide with fear as she meets Robbie’s steady gaze, knowing that this could be the end: no glory, no witness, just the two of them and a hard landing. She holds out a hand. He takes it. When they hit the ground hard enough to leave a crater six feet deep, their hands are tightly wound together.

The next time Robbie cracks an eye open, his skull feels like it’s going to shatter under the glaring mid-day heat beating down on it. All he can see is dust below him and blue sky above. As he sucks in a breath, he coughs heavily, taking in half a lung full of dirt as he rolls onto his back. It hurts – god does it hurt – but he is alive. Robbie smiles through cracked and bleeding lips at the realisation.

A moment later, the smile falls from his face: “Daisy?”

Groaning with the effort, Robbie drags himself into a crawl, looking around the wreckage of the containment pod he was lying in and searching for her. The effort brings tears to his eyes, stinging as they blur his vision – but he spots a dark shape lying a few feet away, limply dragging himself towards it, all the while panting her name.

It’s her. Undeniably, the body lying in front of him was Daisy Johnson; although there is blood caked into her hair and the bloom of fresh bruises across her face. Robbie chokes. His breath comes out hoarse, cracking as he lifts a hand to her throat, checking for a pulse, although he cannot tell if she is breathing or not, because she is lying so still. There’s a moment when his trembling fingers feel nothing. Then, weakly, something fights back against his fingertips.

“Daisy . . . wake up. Daisy, please,” Robbie begs to neither man nor god, not since the devil took root within him, but he is begging now. Pulling himself to his knees beside her, he gently shakes her by the shoulder, all the while wincing at every moment. She does not wake. Pale, still, and silent – three things she rarely was – Daisy remained unchanged under the desperate sun, and Robbie felt fresh tears in his eyes as he looked around and saw nothing but cracked earth and sky. But he had to try. “Okay,” he says aloud, scooping her unconscious form into his arms and beginning to stagger towards the sun, “Okay. I’m gonna get us out. Jus’ hang on, okay?”

He’s talking to himself more than he is talking to her. The terrain is desert-like – long fractures mar the hard ground beneath his stumbling feet, blown over with sand – and his voice echoes out across the empty land, yet he does not know if it reaches her. In his arms, Daisy stays still.

Robbie walks on.

By the time he see’s anything but sand on the horizon, the sun has gone from blaring to muted, turning the sky a hazy orange and his skin even browner than it had been. Hours have passed, he is sure; Robbie’s back aches and he can feel the dried blood on his face every time it moves and just when it feels as though another step will kill him – there it is. A building on the horizon. Almost collapsing in shock, he looks down at the girl in his arms, then back at the silhouette. It’s far – another few miles, probably – but it’s _hope_.

Robbie keeps walking. Despite the protesting of his body, he keeps walking until the building becomes a village, and the sun becomes the moon, with only the dancing lights of the settlement ahead as a guiding beacon to draw him in. Daisy is heavy in his arms as he half-falls into the village, blind with exhaustion and only vaguely aware of the shouts as he enters, of the people running towards him: Robbie is only aware of Daisy in his arms, and the need to get her home.

“Please . . . please, help her. Just help her . . .”

A woman makes her way out of the crowd – older but not stooped, standing tall as she assesses him with narrowed eyes under a bun of dark hair, taking in the strangers with caution. She is leader, stepping out of the crowd, as they all fall silent around her. Robbie manages to blink enough for her to come into focus.

“Who are you?” she asks, voice heavily accented with something familiar. The lady gestures to Daisy in his arms and the blood on his face, “You are . . . danger. Where did you come from?”

Robbie replies in Spanish, recognising her voice as his own. “Ma’am, we’re with SHIELD. The government. We – _she_ – she helps people, saves people. I just . . . help her, please.”

Robbie swallows thickly, looking up at her. The next village could be many more miles ahead, and he has no chance of making it there alone. This lady is his only hope. And if he were there alone, that would be okay. But he cannot let Daisy down.

Slowly, after holding his eyes for a minute, the lady nods. “Come with me.”

Still carrying Daisy, Robbie follows the lady past wooden houses and children who have paused mid-game of football, out to a house at the edge of the village. The grass outside is overgrown, wildly twisting around a shell of a car on the lawn, rusted and lying abandoned. The post box outside her home looks as if it has not been used in a long, long time. Inside, lights shine – the door is thrown open, and Robbie steps into the light.

The middle looks like this: Daisy bleeding on a bed in the middle of nowhere, as an old lady and her son tend to her injuries, while Robbie numbly sits on a wicker chair at her bedside, one of Daisy’s hands wrapped in his. There’s red under his fingernails and around his eyes. Stars blink outside above the desert, and the white curtain is blown lightly by a breeze. Above her bed, there is a cross – Robbie does not look at it, keeping his eyes firmly on Daisy until they at last cannot stay open, and he falls into a fitful sleep.

He awakes to her voice, soft and lilting.

“Hey.”

Robbie blinks, looking up to see Daisy’s framed by cushions, her face still worryingly pale, but lips drawn up into a pained smile. Her eyes glow in the low lamplight. A sudden wave of relief hits him, as Robbie’s fingers tighten around hers as he shifts forwards in his chair, moving to be closer to her.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m alive,” Daisy says, “That’s more than I expected. You look like shit.”

Despite himself, Robbie snorts. “Thanks.”

“How did we get here?”

“I woke up in the containment pod – it’s totalled. You were hurt, so I . . .” Robbie pauses, embarrassed, and rubs his free hand through his short hair. “I carried you here.”

“How far?” Daisy asks. When Robbie doesn’t answer, dropping his gaze, she leans forward and squeezes his hand until he reluctantly lifts his eyes back to hers. “How far, Robbie?”

“Far,” he admits, voice cracking. “I didn’t – I didn’t think we were gonna make it.”

Daisy is quiet for a long time. Just when Robbie thinks she might fall back asleep, she speaks again. “Where are we?”

“I, um – I don’t actually know. It’s all a blur. I got you here, this old lady helped you, then I sorta, maybe passed out a bit.”

“ _Robbie_ ,” she chastises lowly. “You should have-”

“What?” he snaps, “left you to die in a desert?”

“Looked after yourself, too,” she corrects firmly. “You’re important as well. To me.”

Robbie swallows around the lump in his throat. Nodding slightly, he feels the tension drain out of the room. Both of them are too tired to be really angry – the hand in his own his warm, edging on feverish, and squeezes tightly back. It feels like a blessing. Robbie is just lifting his eyes back to hers, shyly, hesitantly, when the door opens briskly, causing them both to jump.

“Good,” the old lady from the night before says. “You are awake. Come, breakfast.”

She shuffles out, so they follow – Robbie helps Daisy ease herself out of bed, and lets her lean against him as they walk the creaking floorboards of the small, cluttered house. Robbie hasn’t seen so many pictures of jesus in his life. Warily, they share a glance before joining the lady at the breakfast table, a plate of toast and eggs placed in front of them as they sat. Daisy looked at Robbie, then back towards their host, who was shuffling around the kitchen.

“I’m told you saved my life. Thank you. Not everyone would have helped.”

The old lady hums, adding cups of coffee to the table. “We may be remote, but we see the news here. I know your face. You’re the hero.”

Daisy blushes, ears colouring red at the notion. “Some would say that.”

“Yeah,” Robbie cuts her off, taking a sip of dirt-like coffee and forcing a grin onto his face. “She is.”

Daisy pulls a face, turning back to their host. “But um. We’re not entirely sure where we crashed, so . . . ?”

“You’re south of the border now, superhero,” the old lady says, chuckles dryly. “There’s a phone. You can use it, call for help.”

“Thank you-” Robbie says cheerfully, at the same time Daisy says –

“That might not be such a great idea.”

Frowning, he turns to her. “Why?”

“If we call SHIELD on an unsecure line and give our location, they might not be the first people to get to us. We could end up with the Watchdogs – or worse – _Hydra_ , on our asses.”

Although he is bone-tired and it’s nowhere near the truth, Robbie shrugs. “We can take them.”

“Maybe,” Daisy replies, eyes darting to the window as she gestures with her coffee cup. “But can _they_?”

Robbie’s eyes flick to the town outside. There are people in the street, and kids still playing football. He sighs, “Okay. So what’s the plan?”

“How far is the nearest big city?” Daisy asks, turning to their host. “I mean, safety-in-numbers big. The kind of big that counts.”

The lady turns to them slowly. “We count-”

Daisy flushes, “I didn’t mean-”

“Across the border, back in America. But unless you intend to walk there . . .”

“Um, ma’am,” Robbie says hesitantly, “I noticed you had a car on your lawn. If we could borrow it-”

“That car has not run since my wife died. Many years.”

“I could fix it,” Robbie says, more confidently than he feels. “I’m a mechanic. And we could recompense you for it later-”

“If you can fix it, you can take it,” the lady says, and it’s settled. Robbie spends the rest of the day with a rusted out motor and a handful of tools, working on the engine and trying to dig out the car; Daisy helps the old lady unblock her drains, and plays football with the children of the village, and brings him iced tea in the middle of the day. It’s a quiet sort of life, out there. He half likes it, looking up to wipe the sweat from his eyes to find Daisy sitting with a little girl, teaching her how to plait her namesake into a daisy-chain. There’s a smile on her face that Robbie hasn’t seen before and yeah, this is what life should be.

Daisy catches his eyes and smiles. Robbie grins right on back.

The engine splutters to life in the evening, choking like a drowning thing, and they decide to waste no time. It’s now been a day since they went missing: surely people were looking for them by now, so it was best that they got moving. Plus – with the engine on its death rattle, he isn’t sure how long it will last. They load extra cans of gas into the backseat and their host gives them both a sandwich for the journey. It’s only been a day, and yet Robbie finds himself reluctant to leave the little village, hesitating to say goodbye as he and Daisy pause at the front door.

Standing on the porch, Robbie realises something. “We don’t even know your name, Señorita. After all you’ve done for us . . .”

“Juana.”

“Thank you, Juana,” Daisy says firmly, taking the lady’s hand. Juana has been stern but kind with them, a grandmotherly figure, but her older fingers pale with the way she squeezes Daisy’s hand back. “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be here without you. We’ll find a way to thank you for this, I promise.”

“Nonsense,” Juana waves her off, “What was I to do – leave you to die?”

“Some would’ve.”

The words are softer than before, and lack the resolution that usually carries in her voice. Daisy’s eyes flick to the ground guiltily as she bites her lip. After all the months he has known her – and Robbie has seen Daisy level buildings with a flick of her wrist – it still surprises him that her voice shakes sometimes, and she often looks so sad when nobody is looking. Noticing the change in her, he watches her quietly until Juana clears her throat.

“Don’t want to be listening to anyone else, girl. The world will always hate people who are different. It’s your right to spit in their eye and prove them wrong.”

A small, sure smile flicked across Daisy’s lips. “Goodbye, Juana.”

As Daisy turned, skipping towards the car rattling in front of the house. Robbie nodded to their host, taking her hands and kissing her on the cheek as he left.

“Thank you. For everything.”

Juana waves a hand, bathed in the light from inside. “S’nothing. Be careful on the road.”

It’s an odd way to say goodbye. It seems to fit right, all the same. Robbie and Daisy peel out of the village in a car that is held together by rust and rattles down the road, groaning at every gear shift in protest, and children run behind the car as they leave, waving and shouting goodbye. Something burns in Robbie’s chest as he looks at Daisy leaning out the window, waving back.

Then it’s just them and the open road.

“How far to HQ?” Robbie asks, the headlights cracked but picking up the dirt road stretching out ahead of them, surrounded by grass taller than the car, as they drove under an ocean of stars. Turning his head slightly, he saw Daisy was sitting awkwardly, still sore from her injuries, but was making shapes with the wind with her hand out of the open window, turning to him with a wry sort of smile.

“Just keep driving towards the sun, Robbie.”

“It’s night-time. There’s no sun.”

“There will be by the time we’re anywhere close,” Daisy says, tucking her feet up onto the dash. “We’ve got a long way to go yet.”

“Get your feet down,” Robbie says, but there’s no heat in his tone. It’s more of a habit than anything else – because Daisy was the kind of car-guest who sat in the Charger with her feet up and tried to change the radio station every five minutes and had _bled on his seats_ on more than one occasion – she pokes a tongue out at him in response.

“Why do you care? It’s not your _precious_ car.”

He hears the teasing in her voice, and makes a face back. “It’s called being _respectful_ , Johnson.”

She repeats the words back in a high, mocking tone, that does in no way sound like him, cackling out a laugh once she’s done. “Jesus, Robb-o, do you hear yourself? It’s not like the car has feelings.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Whatever, Robb.”

“Or that.”

“Okay Mr. Almighty fucking Ghostrider. Better?”

“I prefer _sir_ Ghostrider, actually-”

She throws a bottle of water at him. Robbie catches it with a laugh. They’ve still got miles and miles to go, with no radio or map or real idea what they will do when they reach a city – but at least they’re going now. And at least he isn’t alone.

It doesn’t sound too bad to him.

“You should try and get some sleep while you can,” he says after a while, the moon overhead round and bright. “Rest will help you heal.”

“M’okay,” Daisy replies. The tired slur in her voice betrays her words. “I’ll stay awake with you, it’s only fair – do you wanna play eye-spy?”

“I don’t think that would be a very long game,” Robbie snorts, resting his hands on top of the wheel to gesture around them. A smile threatens to tug his lips up smugly, but he fights the urge, the empty dirt road and the crappy old car’s inability to go over thirty leaving him free to look at her instead of ahead. “I mean, after grass, and dirt, and moon, and _you_ – I’m about done for things to look at.”

Daisy laughs, face cracking wide open into a smile under the silver light, and he knows which view he prefers.

“Okay, Okay, _point_ ,” she agrees, leaning back in her seat. “But there has to be something we can do, or else this is gonna be one _long_ -ass drive-”

“Tell me stories.”

“Hmmmn?” Daisy hums, blinking up at him.

“Tell me stories to keep me awake – anything, whatever you want. I like the sound of your voice.”

After a silence that lingers for a few seconds too long, in which Robbie feels his cheeks burn and Daisy’s eyes lock onto him – she begins to speak. Daisy tells him about the Top Ten Weirdest Things that have happened to her on missions, and about the time she and someone called Jemma infiltrated a SHIELD base, about her team and her ongoing mission to make May smile – she has managed this 54 times now, she announces proudly – and fills the silence with her chattering, arms flying wildly as she talks, animatedly making the hours pass. As the moon tracks it’s course overhead, Daisy speaks. Robbie finds himself hanging onto every word, laughing along despite only following half of the stories, and he really wasn’t lying when he said that he liked the sound of her voice – Daisy spoke with a warmth and a passion that made it easy to listen to her.

It felt like one minute, he was hearing about _clowns, I’m telling you, for real, fucking creepy clowns trying to kill us, it was insane_ – and the next he was blinking, and the sun was rising.

“I could drive for a while,” Daisy offers, eyes on the muted sunrise. “Give you a break.”

Robbie laughs and shakes his head, “No way. I’ve seen you drive – and I might have been an incorporeal spirit at the time, but that was enough to see that I do not want you behind the wheel of any vehicle I’m in, ever again. Do you even have a driver’s license?”

“I did live in a van for years, you know,” she says, pouting a little as she crosses her arms.

“Poor van,” Robbie replies. “I’m surprised it lasted more than a week, with the way you drive.”

Daisy calls him an asshole, and pouts some more, but he can see the dimples on her cheeks from the effort it took to suppress a smile. They drive it companionable silence until the sun has gone from rising to baking, a fierce presence, and Robbie was really starting to wish this car had air-con. He had taken off his jacket, but his shirt was sticking to his skin with sweat anyways; even with all the windows open and gulping from the bottles of water Juana gave them, it was oppressive. Robbie almost faints when they get to a wooden bridge over a river.

“Right,” he says, pulling up the car beside the bridge. “I’ll be right back.”

Before Daisy can ask what he is doing, Robbie has hopped from the car and run right down to the water, plunging his head into it. After a long moment, he shot straight back up, soaked down to the shoulders, before jogging back to the car with a cheery grin on his face. In all this time, Daisy watches in stunned silence. Robbie slides back into the driver’s seat with a contented sigh.

“That’s better.”

Daisy crosses her arms, “So me putting my feet on the dash is _disrespectful_ , but you dripping all over the place is fine?”

“Yep,” Robbie replies, popping the ‘p’. “It’s a hundred degrees outside. It was this or I die, _again_ , and that’s not an experience I needed a repeat of.”

Giving a disbelieving sort of laugh, one that exploded out of her lips unexpectedly before she clapped her hand over them, Daisy turns to him with an amused look on her face. “You can’t just pull the ‘I died’ card every time we argue, Robbie.”

“You ever died?”

“ _No_ , but-”

“Then I think I do,” Robbie smiles, smugly, plastering it over his face because he knew it would make her laugh. It does. Every time he makes the joke, he tastes the copper of his own blood in his mouth at the memory, but seeing that smile takes the sting away. The taste grows less every time. Now, he grins, and she laughs, and the car rattles over the bridge, spluttering their way with a wheezing engine homewards. Robbie still isn’t sure when this became his life, but he’s not too mad about it.

They make it another hundred miles before the heat gets too much.

“Look,” Daisy says, interrupting the glazed over look in Robbie’s eyes as she points, “trees. We should park in the shade until the sun goes down.”

Robbie shakes his head, “I can keep going.”

“Robbie,” a hand appears on his arm, “pull over.”

He does. The shade only makes it fractionally cooler, but at least he’s not sitting in the car anymore, back against a tree as he guzzles down a bottle of water in thirty seconds flat. Daisy flops down beside him, and takes the second bottle that he offers her with a nod. It’s too warm to sit any closer, their shoulders barely touching; even speaking seems like an effort in the heat. Eventually, Robbie’s eyes drift to a close.

It’s dusk when a shake on his shoulder wakes him. “Come on, flame-boy. We got miles to go before we sleep.”

Taking the hand hovering in front of his face, Robbie is pulled to his feet by Daisy, rubbing a hand over his eyes as he stands. It must have been hours since he had fallen asleep – the sky was turning blue overhead, and the warmth in the air no longer seared – but he couldn’t remember the last time he had slept more than a few hours without waking, covered in a cold sweat. It’s disconcerting to have rested so easily.

Staggering towards their car, Robbie re-attached the left wing mirror, which had fallen after the heat loosened the duct-tape that held it to the body of the car. As he did, he saw Daisy splash some of their remaining water over her face – her eyes were red, with dark circles under them. He frowned.

“You sleep?”

“A little,” she shrugged, “too warm, too achey.” At his concerned gaze, she forced a smile, adding, “Plus SHIELD has _super_ soft beds. There’s money in working for the big man, you know. I got silk sheets at base.”

“Silk sheets, huh?”

Daisy hummed, “My van-sleeping days are over! Guess I’m too used to comfort now, this desert just isn’t up to my standards.”

Robbie smiled, laughing silently at her joke, but that didn’t stop him from fixing her with a searching gaze. “You should try to sleep in the back-seat now – no, don’t argue. You’re injured and Coulson will kill me if I let anything happen to you. Catch a few, Daisy. I can drive for a few hours by myself.”

Although she looks ready to argue, mouth hanging open, she considers his offer for a moment. Clamping her lips shut, Daisy nodded, getting into the backseat. As he got into the driver’s position, Robbie was careful to pull away smoothly, and spent the next five hours meticulously avoiding holes and bumps in the road while she snores softly in the back. It isn’t the same excited storytelling that had kept him going all last night, but the sound is comforting, all the same.

Daisy awakes just as it was starting to grow light again, the blackness of the night being gradually erased by the coming of day. Blinking sleepily, she leans forward, resting her head on the back of his seat.

“Where’re we?”

“Not a clue,” Robbie shrugs. “Sleep well?”

Daisy makes a contented noise in response. Before he can pull over for her to get into the front seat, she’s climbing through the gap between the seats, legs going flying in his face and groaning as she slumps into her seat. Robbie can’t help but laugh.

“Graceful.”

Flipping him the bird, Daisy glances at the dash. “Did you change the fuel?”

“Put the spare gas in earlier. Just gotta hope it lasts.”

“Yay roadtrips,” Daisy sighs, defeated. “I’m sorry about this, by the way.”

“It’s not your fault HYDRA are a bunch of dicks.”

“Yeah, but I asked you to come on the mission with us. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.”

“And if I weren’t here, you’d have been alone in that containment module when it crashed, and might not have made it to the village. You’re _alive_. So am I. Nothin’ else matters, understand?”

Robbie is looking over at her, tone a mixture of stern and soft, reaching out with one hand to touch her shoulder. The road begs for his attention, but he cannot take his eyes off her. Daisy leans into his hand slightly, looking up with shining eyes before giving him a nod.

“Yeah, okay.”

“You don’t have to carry everything, Johnson. ‘Specially not me. I make my own choices – _mine_ – and you’re not responsible for them.”

She was a woman who needed absolution: ever since he had met her, Daisy had carried around so much hurt in her big dark eyes, and wanted absolution, _wanted_ to be released from carrying it all around. She was also a woman who didn’t deserve to be crushed by that weight. The Rider had seen it, and Robbie had too. And Robbie couldn’t take all of her pain away, he couldn’t lift the burden of the things she did – but he could do this. He could take away responsibility for _him_.

In the dawn, a hand reached up and took the one on her shoulder, wrapping her fingers around it. Daisy didn’t say anything, but she didn’t let go, either. She took his hand and held it tightly as they raced towards the sun.

She’s still holding his hand four hours later, when the checkpoint comes into view.

“So what do we do?” Robbie asks, staring down the gates and the men with guns warily. “Tell them you’re pretty much an avenger and ask for help?”

“I’m not an avenger,” Daisy blushes.

He waves a hand, “You’re as good as.”

They approach the border checkpoint and stop the car when they are told to. It’s almost sad to think of abandoning the car now – Robbie had fixed the engine with his own two hands and a roll of duct-tape, and the seats were almost worn to the ground, and it rattled like hell – but it had gotten them there. Not knowing if they would be getting back in, Robbie gave the steering wheel an affectionate pat before he got out. Climbing out, Daisy and Robbie hold their hands up, standing on each side of the car and sharing a look.

It ends like this: Daisy turns back to the men with guns with a shrug, “Um. We’re avengers?”

She’s hears Robbie laugh. The sound lets her know they’re almost home.

**Author's Note:**

> im @ jeffersonjaxson on tumblr if you want to come talk about how quakerider will be canon next series


End file.
